The gloomy news just keeps on coming unfortunately but I guess its a sign of the times in which we live. And trust me, I’m not just posting these to bask in my long-held view that cracks in the UK economy were bound to show.
But now think-tank the Resolution Foundation reports that those earning less than two thirds of median hourly pay – equivalent to £7.69 an hour – rose by 250,000 to 5.2m last year.Almost a quarter of minimum-wage workers have remained on that rate for the past five years.
The foundation’s chief economist, Matthew Whittaker, described the figures as “troubling”.
While recent months have brought much welcome news on the number of people moving into employment, the squeeze on real earnings continues.
Being low paid, and getting stuck there for years on end, creates not only immediate financial pressures, but can permanently affect people’s career prospects.
A growing rump of low-paid jobs also presents a financial headache for the government because it fails to boost the tax take and raises the benefits bill for working people
The report comes on the back of a warning from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission last week. Its State of the Nation report revealed that only one in five workers on low salaries in 2002 had improved their circumstances 10 years on
Endemic levels of low pay mean that millions of families are worse off today than they were before the recession,” warned . . Too many of the jobs that are being created in the economic recovery are low income and high insecurity. They are a dead end, not a road to social progress. And the impact of welfare cuts and entrenched low pay will bite between now and 2020. Poverty is set to rise, not fall
These reports highlight some salient points made by writer and reader alike on these pages, including this post pre-UK jobs data, to contra the more rose-tinted views held by some and will do nothing to help Carney & Co get a good night’s sleep. And the UK government will be having data like this thrown at them by oppostion parties and pressure groups all the way into next May’s general election.
The BBC has more here
Carney- Low pay continues to haunt him and the MPC
